How Movable Is My Type?

This weblog began on Blogger, but I switched to Movable Type early on, because it gave me greater control and better features. Now I have to consider switching to something else. This isn't going to be a bitch-and-moan fest, just a look at how I got here, and where I might go next.

When I first decided to set up my own weblogging software (rather than something hosted elsewhere, like Blogger), I wanted something open source. After all, my server's operating system (Linux), my web server (Apache), and a lot of the other excellent software I use (OpenOffice, Mozilla Firefox, Postfix) are all available under open licences that make them not only free of charge, but also (effectively) public property.

Instead I went with Movable Type. It uses a lot of the free technology I already know and like, such as Perl and MySQL. It has some nifty features - particularly categories - that other packages were missing. And it was free of charge for non-commercial use. But it's a proprietary package: developed by a closed set of developers (a company called Six Apart), and with a fee attached if you use it for things beyond the terms of their personal licence. In other words, it's free (as in "free beer") but not free (as in "free speech").

I decided I could live within the terms of their free(beer) licence, so I installed it, I tweaked it, I enhanced it, and I grew fairly dependent on it. Now Six Apart has released a new version of MT. And the licencing terms have changed. In an attempt to crack down on people whose "personal" use of MT was to set up blogs for themselves and for all of their friends and their friends' friends, they've limited the free(beer) licence to a single user, with up to three blogs.

Guess who has two users and four blogs on his system.

So here are my options: A) Continue using the previous version of MT. B) Trim the usage of my system to fit within MT's new free(beer) licence, and upgrade. C) Just upgrade. (I don't think the new version enforces the more limited licence terms, and if it does I could probably hack it so it didn't.) D) Pay the licence fee that covers my usage, and upgrade. E) Switch to some other software.

I don't like C, on ethical grounds. Six Apart has every right to set the terms and charge fees for their software. I'm leaning away from D, simply because money's tight, and the price seems a bit high. I'm OK with A for now, but eventually I'm probably going to want some new features. I'd really hate to do B, for personal reasons. And E is likely to be problematic, because - although I could probably migrate the content easily enough, I've been taking advantage of some of MT's particular features and plug-ins, and I don't want to lose them.

I haven't made up my mind yet. I am going to do another survey of what other software is out there, paying special attention to those with free(speech) licences that I can be sure will never put me in this quandry again. Greymatter, WordPress, TextPattern, Pivot,
and Blosxom are on my list at the moment.